


Dream a little nightmare

by Wikkid



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:22:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wikkid/pseuds/Wikkid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History repeats itself with Stiles having to go through nightmares again, but the ones from his little stint with death now are very different from what he remembered going through before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream a little nightmare

The nightmares didn't start right away. It wasn't the day after his mom got sick that he started having them. It wasn't right after she got really, really bad, either. It wasn't the night his dad walked in to see him sitting there, her hand cold and limp in his. It wasn't even right after he'd stood there at her grave, watching the box that held the body that wasn't his mom anymore get lowered into the ground, dark wood getting darker as it went deeper into the hole, his not-mom in a box getting covered with clumps of dirt. His dad pulled him away after that, wouldn't let him watch the box get covered up. Took him out for ice cream after as a treat, but Stiles just sat there watching it turn into a bowl of goopy sweet soup, fudge hardened and spreading out over the top like some kind of black lace. They went home after that and his dad gave him this _look_ , like he wanted to say something, but Stiles just headed up to his room and quietly shut his door.

It wasn't that night the nightmares started. Not even the night after. It was almost three weeks before Stiles found himself waking up screaming, his dad's arms around him trying to hold him down, keep him still as he thrashed on the bed. It took him fifteen minutes to calm down, to stop crying, for the hitch in his breath to fade out enough that he could get a good, deep inhale. When his dad asked him about it, he just shook his head. He didn't know. Couldn't remember what it was. He couldn't sleep now, could he go watch tv? He couldn't look up at his dad then, didn't want to see the guilt and sadness on his face. His dad was sad enough. He'd heard him crying behind the closed door of his bedroom. He knew that the bottle of whiskey his dad had kept for special occasions had been replaced at least five times. He just didn't want to add to it.

How do you tell your dad that you're having nightmares that your mom comes to you at night and tells you all the ways you can come be with her? Pills, sharp blades, tripping in the street in front of a bus, falling off a bridge. Every night became a litany of how many ways the human body was this fragile thing that could be broken and torn with barely a thought. He could nick his brachial artery, bleed out in less than five minutes. It would be just like going to sleep. But the idea of having to cut himself had him pushing that idea away. He could inject himself with something, but that was another idea that he cut off before it started. Having to see his mom get stabbed with needles every day to the point that her arms and chest were a mass of bruises had given him a healthy fear of them. Weird, since they were just tiny little things, right? But those bruises that spread under her skin from those little pricks had a lump forming in his throat at the thought. No. No needles. 

Pills? He could do pills. He'd even started getting them prescribed since the nightmares started. Bottles with 'Stilinski' stenciled on them, along with the required dosage and when to take them. He could take those and just slip off to sleep and not wake up screaming this time. But that wasn't what had him screaming. It was never him _dying_ that had him waking up soaked in sweat, screaming until his throat hurt, nails digging into his dad's arm so hard that there were usually lines of red crescent marks from him the next morning that the deputy would wave off explaining at work. It was never the dying, but what happened after. 

It was him still being in that dead body, staring up at everyone around him while they all checked his pulse, did CPR like good little paramedics, gave his dad solemn shakes of their heads and pulled him out of the room. It was watching the room shift when his dad had to be pried off him, his body slipping back to the floor as he heard the wails of grief coming from him. It was being transferred from the floor of his bedroom to the morgue, the view jostling occasionally as the gurney hit those little imperfections on the ground, metal rattling as he was wheeled into a room full of other dead people. It was feeling a strange sort of fear when his pajamas were snipped off of him and he was left there, eight years old and naked on a metal table. It was having to watch someone carve him open like he was a Christmas turkey, peeling skin back and pulling organs out of him that should never see the light of day. It was in trying to scream at them to stop, but not being able to inhale, not being able to move his mouth, not even being able to _blink_. Of course he couldn't blink. He was dead. He was just a body now and they could do whatever they wanted to.

They could send him to a mortuary where they stuck more needles in him, huge ones that sucked out his insides and replaced it with a fluid that just sat like gel in his body. They could smear stuff on his face to make him look 'more alive' and dress him in something that had been cut up the back so they wouldn't have to maneuver him into any weird pupped positions to get dressed. They could lay him in a coffin and put him out on display for everyone to come up and talk _at_ , not to. "I'll miss him." "He was such a good kid." "Shame he had to go so soon after Claudia." "He was my best friend." 

They could close the box and lower him into the ground and he could lie there and listen to the clods of dirt being thrown down onto him. They could pat the ground and roll that fake grass over him and walk away and he could be left there. Left to feel the wetness eventually seep into the coffin, hear the bugs and rodents gnawing through the coffin until they were through and gnawing on him. 

He was usually screaming at that point, screaming to be let out when his dad came running into the room. But the part that woke him was when he swore he could hear his mom in the next plot screaming to be let out too. That was when he'd open his eyes so he couldn't have to hear her begging to be let out, not to be left there, his eight year old brain terrified at the thought of her being stuck in her body like that. He couldn't tell his dad that. Even at that young age, he knew better than to tell his dad that he'd thought about killing himself. That he had dreams about it. That was when he first started keeping things from him, to protect him. It was that need to protect his dad, to keep him from being hurt anymore that finally had him learning how to push those dreams away, that had him researching all he could about dreams, so he'd know how to control it a little better, stop it before it got to that point. Even if a part of him was sad that he didn't get to see his mom anymore, not even in his dreams, he had to push that away. He had to stop it before he wound up listening to her. He couldn't do that to his dad.

It was why he felt a pang of guilt the morning after his more recent nightmare. It had brought up a lot of those feelings for him, a lot of the 'what ifs' that he'd tried so hard to stop thinking about. And he hated seeing that look on his dad's face, like he was worried about him. Like he was remembering the eight year old version he'd had to hold tight in the middle of the night for almost six months. He knew his dad was remembering the similarities just as much as he was and he wished he could take it back.

But he couldn't, so he brushed it off, as usual, said it was nothing. Went on with his day. All while trying not to think about the fact that maybe there was still a part of him that was afraid his mom was still in that box, still screaming to be let out.


End file.
